Wednesday, 5 September 2012

SIX DELIVERIES FROM TODAY AT THE O.D.I.*

ginger recklessness

With England
having secured the essentially meaningless number one ODI ranking until they
get annihilated inIndia
in January, the final game of the series was basically played for pride alone:
the wheee of a win as opposed to the meh of a draw. Still, (Confucius, he
say) winning’s a habit and all that…

However, without Flower’s forbidding dressing room presence,
England
were undone by what the experts call ‘sh*t batting’. And there was a
carrot-topped streak of indiscipline running through it.

First, Resilience’s Ian Ronald Belly-Lad, having prevented
the ball from hitting the stumps by stopping it with one of his pads, a mode of
dismissal known to the selfsame experts as ‘leg before wicket’ (or lbw), decided
to spunk the sole review of the innings
in the fourth over (the very fact that he had to discuss it at all ought to
have told him to shuffle off for a dose of medicine…but then, he has a history of not
wanting to go when dismissed on this ground). This was cricket’s equivalent
of putting all your cash on the roulette wheel (red, obviously) on the first
night of a once-in-a-lifetime’s-savings-funded fortnight in Vegas.

Then, after the awful inevitability of Ravi’s failure (see
below), Body Language’s Jonny Bairstow played a cameo from off of the balls of
his feet, bopping hither and thither to prod down the hot tin roof of a pitch,
‘taking it’ to Big Morkel with aggressive intent, before unnecessarily walking across his stumps and chipping one to deep
square leg. Red Bull at a gate. After that, Eion Morgan skipped down the pitch
to JP Duminy’s nondescript, _____ offies and got too close to the ball,
slapping it flat to mid on.

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a young (and
undoubtedly high) Ozzy Osbourne earning a living in Berlin in the 1970s by
being on call for an eccentric German aristocrat (if that is not itself
tautological) whose highly particular fetish involved lying beneath a glass
coffee table while someone (Ozzy, in this instance) perched above it and… – well,
there’s not a sufficiently delicate way to put it – defecated atop the hitherto transparent surface. Whatever turns you
on, I guess.

For any workshy young deviant, one for whom the last
vestiges of ‘self-esteem’ have long since flown the roost, that is truly a gig
to inspire envy. Getting paid for dumping – unbelievable, Jeff! (Mind you, I’m
not entirely sure one could get away with listing it as a legitimate ‘job goal’
when signing a Jobseeker’s Agreement.)

Anyway, I mention Ozzy only to illustrate the fact that the
modern world is full of cushty sinecures and chancers blagging it in easy billets,
all of which brings us to Ravi Bopara, continually selected as a batsman for an
international cricket team and yet not required to make any actual runs. Nice
work if you can get it!

“But he brings a lot to the party,” his apologists counter.
Fine, but his bag of cheap Es and wraps of meow-meow are no use if you don’t
fancy the adult confectionary.

narks

It’s the Big (well, Medium-Sized) Debate: are ODIs just a
sugar rush (and not quite as good a sugar rush as the new stuff) providing
little in the way of nourishment? Maybe. Either way, we all know “sugar’s
rubbish”. But the ECB tried to persuade us that a five-match Australia
series shoehorned into the middle of the summer was a worthy sporting attraction,
that those bright yellow jerseys would compete with the other prominent bright
yellow jerseys of the summer’s sports stories – the ones that started out
clean, with the everyman brilliance of Bradley Wiggins, and yet ended sullied,
with the news that seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong was to be
banned for steroids, WADA completely ignoring the fact that he has beaten
cancer and thus had immunity from everything… Yet this hasn’t been the only
sporting drugs story of late. Oh no.

Many felt that the ECB were clutching at straws when they
accused the Saffers of being drugs cheats. Sour grapes, they said. Yet, after
the crushing Oval Test victory that set up the D’Oliveira series win, Graeme
Smith could scarcely have been more candid: “we owe a lot to hash”. He then
skipped off to fashion a makeshift bong from a Gatorade bottle. Conclusive and
damning evidence, no?

Amla, meanwhile, went of for some throwdowns. He was
reported to have lent his prayer mat to Alistair Cook.

“the sun always
shines on TB” (A-ha!)

After some deliberation while he located the correct shelves
in His omniscience, God, a.k.a. the Supreme Being (sometimes referred to as
Allah or Yahweh), has given his final verdict in the great debate taking hold
of Midlanders East and West – i.e. which city is the better: Birmingham
or Nottingham? – and he has done it through
the medium of weather.

The game here was played out under pale blue skies (prior to
the floodlit part, smartass), as had been the T20 game against the West Indies
and the four days of the Wisden Trophy Test. Down the road in Brummidge, things
haven’t gone quite so swimmingly (well, you know what I mean). Three out of
five days of their Windies Test were washed out, as was the Cashraker ODI
against Australia
in July.

Conclusive.

Woak-o Oh-Yes!

With England
missing the ambivalent hipsterism of Stuart Broad – “I’ll give the Barnet and
clobber a whirl, but I don’t want to commit to all the sh*t on my arm” – it was
good to see a frontline seamer of real batting ability at number 8 (a pet topic
of someone of this
parish).

“He could be whatever he wants to be,” pundits are wont to
say of young cricketers of promise. Well, given that young people want to be
things like dragons and drones and drills, it is doubtful whether one should adhere
to that notion. Even so, his naked batting talent, the excellent positions he
gets into, the instinctive movement of his hands, the range of strokes, all augur
well for England’s search for Test-class all-rounders: here may be a fourth
seamer eventually capable of batting as high as number 6.

* NB. We have made it five in
honour of England
short-changing the crowd to the tune of 29 balls, thus allowing SA to knock off
with 93 balls to spare. Please take it up with the ECB.